


How to (Re)Build a Hero

by Liu



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, First Kiss, M/M, an idiot could write this fanfic and an idiot did, blatant disregard for actual science, i pulled the science on this out of my ass around midnight, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 07:21:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8480713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liu/pseuds/Liu
Summary: After his suit is destroyed, Ray keeps finding scrap metal in his room.[post-LoT 2x03]





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [niennavalier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/niennavalier/gifts).



> So I was supposed to write this a week ago, but I procrastinated like crazy, so here you go, a week too late for this to even make sense probably.
> 
> It's the result of a chat with niennavalier on tumblr - hope you'll enjoy it, because this is all your fault :D
> 
> Also I feel like I have to apologize in advance for the science nonsense in this fic. Please feel free to point out all the reasons why this wouldn't work :'D but the world needs more atomwave so I decided to ignore the fact that I know nothing about Ray's suit or... anything, really.

Ray doesn’t know who he is anymore.

He’s been a businessman, a CEO, but that went up in smoke, quite literally, a long time ago. He’s been a scientist, but that doesn’t seem to hold much relevance on a time ship equipped with an AI with the knowledge almost a century ahead of him. He’s jumped at the opportunity to be a hero, to do something, _anything_ to make a difference, but that has been yanked out of his grasp… by no one else but himself.

It’s his fault that the shogun got his hands on the A.T.O.M. suit – it’s his fault that he never thought to build a system that would only respond to him, or one that would be complicated enough that a feudal lord from the seventeenth century couldn’t figure it out. Ray would have liked to blame Nate, at least a little bit, but he can’t – he knows that the blame lies with him, and it churns in his stomach, making him almost physically sick every time he thinks about it.

He thinks about it a lot, in the long hours when Sara benches him and tells him to ‘keep watch’ aboard the Waverider.

It’s not that he feels completely worthless; he’s still smart, and he’s still more than willing to help (no, _desperate_ to help would be more accurate). But it’s difficult to figure out his strengths when it feels like all that he’s built himself on, all the cornerstones of who he thought he was, have been destroyed before his very eyes.

No matter how many times someone tells him that the suit doesn’t make a hero, Ray still feels the same helplessness, the same untethered frustration. He smiles and nods and tells them he understands, but he doesn’t, not as much as he probably should.

So it doesn’t really help his mood when he walks into his room – forty-seven hours and fifteen minutes since the A.T.O.M. suit, and Ray’s chance at making a real difference, exploded and left nothing behind – and stumbles against a piece of debris lying on the floor.

He lets out a frustrated groan, not one to curse out loud even in situations like this, when he feels like he’s slowly, surely drifting apart, like the universe expanding ever so slowly until everything is just a little too far from everything else. He glances down to figure out what has he stumbled on – it’s a piece of scrap metal, probably twelve inches across in an odd shape, but when he bends down to pick it up and get it out of his way, his heart stops.

He would know that material anywhere. He’s worn it on his body frequently enough that the feel of the alloy is like a friend’s touch, but the faded purple paint makes it clear that this particular bit doesn’t belong to him.

He tosses it in the vague direction of his desk and collapses onto his bed, turning his back on the reminder of everything he’s lost.

…

Next time, it’s a coil of wiring, foreign enough that Ray is half-sure it comes from the future, but as he picks it up, his mind starts whirring with all the possibilities this could be repurposed, disassembled, reused in-

Ray shuts that thought down before he can build the false hopes up in his head. The wiring joins the scrap of dwarf star alloy still sitting on his desk.

…

Three weeks later, Ray’s desk is barely visible under the pile of odd bits and pieces, scrap metal and servos and tiny devices of unknown purpose. It looks like a workshop, and something about the messiness of it makes Ray feel at home, like he’s back in his own lab – but that also brings back the memories of barely sleeping enough not because he couldn’t, but because he was excited to wake up, impatient to kick back the blankets and get back to work on what felt like a challenge, an impossibility waiting to be solved.

It’s a bittersweet memory, at best; these days, he’s feeling the impossibility as a much heavier burden.

He doesn’t want to bring it up, because he doesn’t know who could be leaving these weirdly accurate materials for his suit just lying on his floor: he never sees who brings them, and he would like to tell the person to shove it, to stop pouring salt into his already aggravated wound. But that would require asking people who might not have the slightest idea what he’s talking about. It would mean pointing out how _not okay_ he actually is, and Ray’s not willing to bring attention to his own problems when they’ve got bigger fish to fry and time anomalies to stop – even if he can’t contribute much to the efforts.

So he piles up the scraps and tries not to look at them too much, and he gets used to sleeping on the side that allows him to turn his back to the faint hope lying in pieces not ten feet away.

…

Five more days, and Ray’s desk isn’t enough. There’s a strip of fabric now, too, a stretchy yet firm blend just waiting to be imbued with transmitters and microwiring, just enough of it to make a sleeve. Something that looks like a shield leans against his wall, and tiny carbon tubing spills over the floor, along with several heavier coils of wire and other debris.

He’s considering throwing it all out, but he can’t bring himself to do it – he’s actually trying to muster up the courage for the deed with some hearty soup when Mick walks into the kitchen and starts rummaging through one of the cabinets.

“So how’s the suit going?” Mick asks, and Ray stops stirring the soup, eyes going wide.

“It’s you,” he breathes more than whispers – of all the people aboard the Waverider, he wouldn’t have expected it to be Mick, but then, he remembers Chronos and thinks that if someone knows a thing or two about exosuits here, it would be the bounty hunter trained by the Time Masters themselves.

For the first time, it occurs to him that maybe Mick also knows a thing or two about not knowing who he is; but then, Mick doesn’t seem to be big on soulsearching, so maybe not.

The man raises an eyebrow in that expression of his that seems like a cross between ‘pissed off’ and ‘really pissed off’, but Ray’s known him long enough that he’s able to interpret it as a mild ‘duh’ (even though he probably wouldn’t say that out loud to Mick’s face).

“Who did you expect, Haircut, a Queen of France?”

“No, I mean, it’s you,” Ray stutters and quickly starts stirring again when he hears the tell-tale hissing of things burning that shouldn’t get burned. “You’ve been leaving all that stuff in my room. The… material.”

Mick grunts, but that could be the result of the Waverider’s snack supply being out of Pop-Tarts again. He doesn’t deny it, in any case, and Ray takes that as admission of guilt.

“Why?” he asks quietly, and Mick doesn’t look at him, but he stops pulling out random packets of snacks for a moment.

“Tech and gimmicks don’t make a hero,” he grumbles, and Ray braces himself for the same speech he’s heard a dozen times already, but Mick squares his shoulders and something in his expression hardens, and he doesn’t quite deliver. “But sometimes you gotta rebuild anyway.”

Ray thinks of the heat gun, and of the futuristic Chronos suit that would make Mick a lot less susceptible to harm and a lot more durable and deadly in a fight – the suit that he hasn’t seen on Mick in a long, long time. And Ray wonders if maybe, Mick gets it, after all.

For a while, the silence is only interrupted by Ray’s stirring and Mick’s complaining about the lack of edible snacks onboard. When Ray’s done, he pours some of the tomato soup into a bowl and adds a heap of sugar, the way his favorite nanny used to make it when he was little. He hands it to Mick, with a small smile and an even tinier sliver of hope, for who knows what; Mick gives him a calculating, suspicious glare and scowls at the soup.

“What’s that?”

“Tomato soup,” Ray shrugs, and Mick makes a face:

“You wanna poison me, Haircut?”

“It’s sweet?” Ray tries again. Mick glances towards the (almost empty) snack cabinet and gruffly accepts the bowl.

He ends up asking for seconds. Ray stops fighting back the thoughts of his suit.

…

It’s a long process. Even though Ray can’t do much for the team as he is, he still tries to do as much as he _can_ , which means he doesn’t have the time to pull all-nighters and forty-hour-long workdays. The steady stream of debris and spare parts on his floor doesn’t stop, though Ray never manages to catch Mick in the act. Sometimes, Mick will look at Ray from across the bridge, or when they pass each other in the hallway, and Ray nods and smiles, because even without words, it means a lot to him that Mick is going through all the trouble to find all this stuff who knows where. Ray doesn’t ask, and Mick doesn’t acknowledge it for quite some time. It’s months before the suit starts taking proper shape, nearly a year before it’s anywhere close to completion. Ray has found his place in the team, because they all get creatively banged up into medical impossibilities and he has to figure out a way to keep them all alive, with vaccines and antidotes and carefully constructed lunchboxes. Mick always complains about vegetables, and Ray does his best to remember his nanny’s recipes to conceal the taste as much as possible.

Ray feels hope course through his veins like a sugar high, so when the crash comes, it’s not pretty.

Even though Mick’s deliveries are eerily accurate, there’s a limit to what Ray can do without his blueprints, without his lab and his own resources, aboard a time ship. When he first realizes his efforts will likely go unrewarded, it hits him like a brick to the head and he has to leave, has to get out of his room, away from the suit that will remain unfinished, or at least, without the ability that has been the most helpful to the team.

He finds Mick in the kitchen again, even though Ray wasn’t consciously looking for him; he pulls a bottle of water from the fridge and sits down at the table, feeling heavier and older than an hour ago.

Mick acknowledges him with a small nod, but when Ray keeps quiet and drains the whole bottle of water in one go, Mick’s eyebrow shoots up.

“What’s wrong, Haircut?”

“Nothing,” Ray lies, but even Mick, always ready to dodge a deeper conversation in normal circumstances, doesn’t buy it. He waves at Ray’s empty water bottle and snorts.

“That why you’re sitting here trying to drown yourself?”

A small, insincere chuckle escapes Ray at that and he shakes his head.

“No. It’s…” he hesitates, because he planned to repeat that it’s nothing, that he’s fine, but something within him claws to the surface and the truth spills out. “It’s the suit. It won’t shrink. Or, well, it could, but it would almost certainly blow up.”

“You made it work before.”

Ray laughs, hollow and hopeless.

“Yeah. In a multi-million dollar lab, with resources I don’t have here. And I still almost blew myself up, mind you. The cooling system I can put together here is just not going to cut it. I’ll probably be able to go to half my size, for a short while, but that’s it.”

The suit is still going to be able to fly, also for short periods of time, and he’ll get a few shots in a fight, but it definitely not up to the standards Ray’s used to ( _was_ used to, sixteen months ago). He knows he should be grateful, and he is, to Mick at least, for _trying_ , but after getting his hopes up, it still feels like defeat.

Mick pushes away from the table and walks out, and Ray wants to laugh at himself. Why did he think Mick would care? It’s not like it’s his problem – he’s been helpful enough with his impromptu delivery service, and he never offered counseling as a part of the deal. Ray sighs and lets his head fall against the cool surface of the table. He should pull himself together: and he will, he knows he will, but he needs a minute to just… wallow in his misery, for a while.

When he hears footsteps approach, he’s ready to claim a headache in order to avoid any and all questions, but when he raises his head from the table (forehead hurting from having been pressed into the hard surface for so long), it’s Mick again.

And he hands Ray something blue and bright.

Ray doesn’t realize what it is until his fingers wrap around the elongated shape. It’s cold, so cold it almost hurts his fingers, and Ray’s eyes widen in shock. It can’t be- but where else would Mick get something like… that?

“This is-“

“A cooling system,” Mick interrupts, and a shadow crosses his face; even after all these months, it seems he’s not quite able to talk about Leonard Snart. But Ray doesn’t really need to ask: he’s seen the cold gun enough times to _know_ , and that knowledge grabs onto Ray’s heart with a vice-like grip.

“I can’t use this,” he whispers, and Mick throws himself down onto a nearby chair with more force than necessary.

“With your brain you’ll figure it out, Haircut,” he huffs, and his voice is a bit more raw than usual. Ray imagines him sitting alone in his room, disassembling the last memento he has of his best friend, his partner, his _hero_ , and Ray’s throat goes dry at the thought.

“No, I mean-“ he tries, but Mick reaches across the table and his rough, thick fingers wrap around Ray’s hand on the cold container.

“I know,” Mick’s mouth says; _you can_ , his eyes say for him where words fail. “You’re gonna rush into a fight without that suit anyway and then who’ll make shit-colored lunches for us?”

It should be funny, but Ray can’t quite make his eyes stop stinging. He swallows and tries to figure out a way to put the enormous wave of gratitude and sympathy and all the emotions choking him into actual words, but he finds he can’t. His free hand covers Mick’s instead, and when he musters up the courage to look at the man again, he knows there’s no room for self-doubt and self-pity anymore, not when Mick put something like this in his hands without hesitation.

“I won’t let you down,” Ray says in the end, when he feels like his voice won’t completely fail him. “Neither of you,” he adds, and he can see it flicker in Mick’s eyes, the pain he won’t let out.

He doesn’t know why he leans over the table, but the overwhelming _everything_ in his chest is forcing him to move before he can think twice. Mick takes a sharp breath when Ray’s lips connect with his, but he doesn’t pull away; the kiss is more gratitude than a demand, anyway, and Ray, strangely, doesn’t feel rejected when a large hand presses against his heart and pushes him away.

“If you got time for that, Haircut, go finish your damn suit,” Mick grumbles, but Ray would swear to everything that’s holy to him that Mick’s cheeks, scruffy and scarred, are stained with pink. It’s such a strange sight on him that it makes Ray chuckle all the way back to his room, and it sticks to the back of his mind even as he figures out how to rewire the essential part of the cold gun to work with his suit.

He doesn’t say a word when Mick walks into his room a few hours later, carrying a coil of wire that’s such a blatant excuse it doesn’t even require pointing out. Mick sits on Ray’s bed and watches him work, and Ray thinks it’s to make sure that the precious part is not wasted, but Ray would also like to think it’s a little bit to check on _him_ , too. As long as he doesn’t voice that thought, there’s nobody to deny it.

At two in the morning, or what would be two if they weren’t floating through the timestream again, Mick hauls him away from the suit and pushes him towards bed.

“Don’t blow yourself up just because you’re too stupid to get rest,” he snarls, but he kisses Ray’s cheek before he stalks out.

That night, Ray sleeps with the bright blue glow of the cold container coloring the inside of his eyelids, and the memory of the dry lips tinting his dreams.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [tumblr](https://pheuthe.tumblr.com/) :)


End file.
